The plant remains frozen in time - little has changed from the day it opened in 1914. The 10 original beehive kilns are still here, & 90% of the original equipment & buildings are still intact & fully operational. The plant was established in 1912-14 & remained in operation until 1989. In 1992, three years after the plant closed, it was donated to the Heritage Foundation & was subsequently designated a National Historic Site in 1994 & a Provincial Heritage Property in 1998.

The history of the site actually goes back to 1886 when a gentleman named Tom McWilliams discovered the clay deposit. After he received a good report on the assay sample, he quickly laid claim to that quarter section of land, & over the next 25 years, he dug the clay by hand & hauled it the 60 kms to Moose Jaw by horse & wagon where he sold it to an established brick manufacturer.

In 1904, when news of an impending rail line was announced, Tom entered into a partnership with a group of Moose Jaw businessmen to develop the site, & the Moose Jaw Fire Brick and Pottery Company was born. By 1912, the other partners had bought out Tom's shares & the Saskatchewan Fire Brick and Pottery Company Limited was formed. The Plant closed in 1914 because of WWI & a recession in the economy. It reopened in 1916 & was renamed Dominion Fire Brick and Pottery Company. Redcliff Pressed Brick purchased the plant in 1954 & renamed it slightly to Dominion Fire Brick & Clay Products (1954) Ltd. Soon after, the operations were purchased by a multi-national company, AP Green Fire Brick Company, which is when 6 of the 10 coal-fired kilns were converted to natural gas. They operated the plant until it closed in 1989.

"Clay to kiln": Basically, the brick making process here involved the on-site mining of the clay, the transfer of the clay from stock piles to the plant, the preparation of the clay (grinding, screening, mixing), brick shaping either with presses or by hand (using molds designed in the lab & made in the carpenter shop), followed by the drying process, the firing process in the kilns, & then the transfer of the fired bricks to box cars for shipping or to the stock sheds. Dry clay was also sold in bags.

It took about 5 or 6 six weeks to produce a kiln full of brick at the plant: 1 week to press the brick, 1 week in the drying tunnels, 1 week to load a kiln, 1 week to fire the bricks in the kiln, & 1 week or more to cool & unload a kiln. For hand-molded bricks, you needed an extra 3 days or so of hot floor drying.

"Where Claybank brick was used": The global significance of this plant will surprise you, at least it did me ;o) Not only was Claybank Brick used throughout Saskatchewan & Canada, it was also used in the United States, Cuba, Algeria, & Europe. For example, high grade Claybank refractory bricks were used in the construction of the launch pads at Cape Canaveral, Florida, for the moon shots in the 1970's. In fact, AP Green Refractories, the multi-national company that owned the Claybank plant for the final 30 years of production, was the supplier of refractory brick for NASA. Refractory brick was also sent to Cuba in the 1960's for their sugar mills.

The plant was a major manufacturer of domestic clay firebrick & other refractory products for the railway, oil refining, power & metallurgical industries, & was also known for its attractive facebrick, tiles, & insulating brick. The rare firebricks produced here lined the fire boxes of CN & CP Rail steam locomotives, the boilers at British Commonwealth Air Training bases across western Canada, as well as the boilers of Corvette & Destroyer warships in WWII. (Working at the brick plant was considered an essential service during WWII.)

Bricks from the plant grace the facades of many prestigious buildings in Saskatchewan & other parts in Canada. The distinctive, high quality, buff-colored facebrick that they produced here until the 1960s can be found on buildings across the prairies & as far east as Quebec. (The central tower of the Chateau Frontenac National Historic Site in Quebec City is faced with Claybank Brick.) The beautiful cathedral in Gravelbourg is faced entirely of Claybank brick, as are a number of court houses & other public buildings in the province.

"Kilns": The first kilns built at the brick plant were scove kilns - rectangular kilns without crowns or tops. The bricks from those kilns were used to build the first down-draft beehive kilns at the plant. Once they were operational, the inferior scove kiln bricks were used to build parts of the smoke stacks.

When a brick cart of green brick came out of the drying tunnels, it was transferred along a portable track & the bricks loaded into a kiln. Once the kiln was loaded, the portable track was removed & the kilns were brought to about 2300-2500 degrees F, depending on the type of brick being made. The temperature was monitored with pyrometric cones that melted & bent over when certain temperatures were reached inside the kiln. Two or three cones were pushed into a block of clay & placed in the kiln within view of a peep-hole brick installed in the doorway. Since each cone melted at a different temperature, the foreman or fireman could determine when the kiln was getting close to the maximum firing temperature needed & when it was achieved.

The fumes & smoke emitted during the firing process were eliminated through the down-draft flues & directed out a smoke stack. (Two kilns shared one smoke stack & were connected by underground flue tunnels.) Waste heat from the cooling kilns, which was clean & reusable, was recycled twice at the plant - first to heat the drying tunnels, & then to heat the floor of the hand-molding shop. To enable the heat transfer, one of the kiln doorways had wicket bricks, & once the kiln had cooled down enough, part of the doorway was unbricked & a large goose-neck pipe was inserted & connected to the waste-heat tunnel system.

Sources for more information http://www.claybank.sasktelwebsite.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claybank_Brick_Plant

There's an excellent visual tour here including an extensive historical photo gallery & stories: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/pm.php?id=exhibit_home&fl=0&lg=English&ex=00000163